The World That's Coming

It’s going to be one of those days when my attentions are always elsewhere, I can tell; I’ve been up and working for an hour, but not finishing anything, merely starting and extending existing projects, jumping from one to another with something approaching anxiety about not doing enough, or not finishing everything or or or.

It won’t last, of course; today, as with everyday, things have to be finished and published and the dreaded deadline doom rules all. But in the morning, there’s always this strange, wonderful space where I can be unfinished and messy and slowly come to, each day. Where being distracted is more a curiosity than an irritation, and I don’t have the immediate, constant feeling that I should have published something ten minutes ago throughout the entire day.

Sunday was lost to doing taxes, or at least that’s what it felt like — we started doing them after breakfast, and aside from a break for lunch, finished them around 6:30 in the evening. It’s not that our taxes are extremely complicated, but with two freelancers and everything else that’s involved in our lives every year, it all takes awhile to get everything down properly. It’s the same every year; we think that we’re prepared, but before too long, we’re both looking at our screens and at our paperwork with a sense of what is actually going on? and wondering whether there’s some easier way to do everything that we’d somehow missed (Spoilers: There’s not.)

By the time the evening rolled around, there really was a sense of the day having gone missing, somehow. Twilight was coming! Where did the day go? Why do I have this stress headache? Where has all our money gone? Truly, tax day is the best day of the year, he lied.